sports, architecture, and porn. A handful of early research suggests VR embeds itself deeper in our psyche, stays with us longer, and can alter our behaviour longer afterward than any other type of media we consume. It’s been shown to influence racial and sexual stereotypes. It has triggered emotional rewiring in users. With such great power comes great responsibility. Will our immersive travels make us the best versions of ourselves? Or the worst? Should people be allowed to virtually act out anything they choose? What about rape fantasies? What happens when you virtually kill people and feel like you actually did? When researchers show people traditional media, such as TV and movies, and then subject them to similar content in virtual reality, they are initially affected by both equally. But a week later, “they forget their exposure to everything but the VR scenario,” says Sun Joo Ahn, a researcher at the University of Georgia. “What they experience in a sensory way sticks with them over time. The effects are persistent.” Consider too the racial- and gender-stereotyping issues already plaguing the gaming and entertainment industries. When the line between real and unreal becomes blurrier, do we need different rules?
Being a woman at GDC is a like being a brunette in Sweden—you exchange knowing nods with other members of your tribe. You also studiously avoid herds of men with unkempt beards. Spread across three giant buildings at Moscone, it’s Disneyland for gamers. There are booth babes and dudes in tees walking with their phones out, capturing every moment. The VR track is jam-packed with the kind of buzz befitting a technology at an inflection point. The popular kids on the block—the aforementioned Epic, Oculus, Sony, Google, and Samsung—required appointments to experience their wares. All told, I road-tested five VR games and didn’t encounter a single female or minority onscreen. EVE: Valkyrie, one of two video games bundled with the Rift, does feature a female military captain—and black soldiers are not uncommon in war games—but, as in all video games, they tend to play to stereotypes. That’s no accident. “If a company’s already sold a trillion copies of Grand Theft Auto in which we smack around women and sexualise them, why change that?” asks Jesse Fox, a researcher I spoke to at Ohio State University. “If companies are already taking a risk on a new technology, they’re not also going to take risks with different types of content.”
FOX, TAT E UNIVERSITY RESEARCHER
if some men see women as sluts and teases, and then interact with avatars like that in vr, then their ideas are confirmed.
Fox studies the way in which new media technologies—including VR, video games, and social networking— influence our offl ine identities, beliefs, and behaviours. She has studied how virtual virgins and female vamps altered users’ real-world attitudes. After exposing research subjects to vamps in VR, Fox found women and men are both more likely to buy into the rape myth: the idea that women have an unconscious desire to be raped. “In media studies, we’ve seen that people will look to confi rm their biases,” Fox says. "If you think all black men are criminals, for example, you might see a black male criminal in a fi lm and go, ‘See, I was right.’” Extending those stereotypes into VR, where interactions feel more real, could reinforce them further. “If there are men who see women as sluts and teases, and then they interact with avatars that play into those stereotypes in virtual reality,” she says, “then the more their ideas are confi rmed, and the more they’ll believe them.” Extreme uses of VR might be inevitable. “Say I’m a teenage boy who gets rejected for prom, so I go home and make that girl’s avatar, and rape her in a virtual world,” she says. “These cases pose a huge risk of harm.” But some of the most revealing